President Trump on Sunday sought to move past allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, effectively dismissing the importance of the intelligence community’s definitive conclusion about a foreign adversary in pursuit of a collaborative partnership with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

Issuing his first public comments since sitting down with Putin in Germany, Trump vowed to “move forward in working constructively with Russia” and said the two leaders were forming a cybersecurity unit to protect against the kinds of illegal intrusions that U.S. intelligence agencies say Putin ordered in the United States.

After Putin denied any such election interference in his meeting with Trump, the U.S. president tried to turn the page altogether on the issue of Russian hacking. As special counsel Robert S. Mueller III investigates Russian interference and possible collusion with Trump campaign officials, Trump has repeatedly labeled the issue a hoax and has portrayed it as a dark cloud unfairly hanging over his first six months as president.

Trump’s pledge to partner with Putin drew swift and stern denunciations from both Democratic and Republican officials, who cast the U.S. president as dangerously naive for trusting his Russian counterpart and said Russia must be forced to pay a price for its election interference.

Does Trump believe Russia meddled in the election? Washington weighs in

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Washington weighs in on President Trump's visit to theGroup of 20 summit in Hamburg, and whether he believes that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

Trump delivered his account of the meeting with Putin, held Friday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, via several defiant tweets fired off Sunday morning from the White House, just before visiting his Northern Virginia golf course — as opposed to in a news conference such as the one Putin held with journalists Saturday.

Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Trump believed Putin’s assurances that Russia did not interfere in the election. “It seemed to me that he took it into account and agreed,” Putin told reportersSaturday, although he added: “You should ask him.”

Initially, U.S. officials traveling with Trump would not dispute Putin’s and Lavrov’s accounts when asked by reporters. On Sunday, however, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, who remained in Washington during the trip, rejected the Russian characterization.

“It’s not true,” Priebus said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The president absolutely did not believe the denial of President Putin.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded definitively that Russian authorities tried to influence the election in Trump’s favor with illegal hacking and propaganda and other activities.

Trump’s public comments on the issue have been far less definitive, varying widely from tepid acknowledgment to outright doubt about Russia’s role. Under questioning from Fox host Chris Wallace, Priebus also showed varying degrees of certainty about whether Trump believes Russia meddled in the election.

See President Trump in Europe for the G-20 economic summit

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The president made his way to Germany for the meeting of world leaders after a stop in Poland.

“He said they probably meddled in the election. They did meddle in the election,” Priebus said, seeming to grow more definitive. But then Priebus seemed to back off: “Yes, he believes that Russia probably committed all of these acts that we’ve been told of. But he also believes that other countries also participated in this activity.”

Trump on Sunday revealed his continued fixation with some aspects of the Russia issue. He falsely accused President Obama of doing “NOTHING” after learning of the Russian hacking before the election. In fact, on Oct. 7, about a month before the election, the Obama administration formally and publicly blamed Russia for the hacking. Some Obama administration officials have since said they regret not responding more forcefully.

Trump also chided the news media and, in the context of his meeting with Putin, claimed vaguely that “questions were asked” about the level of cooperation between intelligence agencies and the Democratic National Committee, whose email server was among those allegedly compromised by the Russians.

John Brennan, who served as CIA director under Obama and ran the agency’s response to Russia’s election interference, chastised Trump on Sunday for repeatedly casting doubt on the conclusions of the intelligence community, including at a news conference last week in Poland.

“I seriously question whether or not Mr. Putin heard from Mr. Trump what he needed to about the assault on our democratic institutions,” Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Brennan added of Trump, “He said it’s an ‘honor’ to meet President Putin. An honor to meet the individual who carried out the assault against our election? To me, it was a dishonorable thing to say.”

Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) — three leading Republican hawks on Russia — said Sunday that Trump’s eagerness to partner with Putin was dangerous for the United States.

“When it comes to Russia, he’s got a blind spot,” Graham said on “Meet the Press.” “To forgive and forget when it comes to Putin regarding cyberattacks is to empower Putin, and that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

Rubio tweeted that Putin “will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner,” and that working with him to address cybersecurity threats was akin to partnering with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to protect against chemical weapons.

McCain, meanwhile, lamented that Russia has faced “no penalty whatsoever” from the Trump administration for its hacking.

“We know that Russia tried to change the outcome of our election last November, and they did not succeed, but there was really sophisticated attempts to do so,” McCain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So far, they have not paid a single price for that.”

Invoking the language of Trump’s tweet, McCain added, “Yes, it’s time to move forward, but there has to be a price to pay.”

McCain championed a bill, passed overwhelmingly in the Senate last month, to slap additional sanctions on Russia. The Trump administration has said it opposes the measure because it preempts the president’s powers to apply sanctions.

During a visit to Ukraine, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Sunday that existing sanctions would remain in place until Moscow reverses its intervention in Ukraine and respects the border between the two countries.

Trump tweeted Sunday, “Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved,” adding a reference to Russia’s role in Syria’s civil war.

Trump also said the issue of sanctions was not discussed in his meeting Friday with Putin, contradicting what Tillerson, who was in attendance, told reporters soon after the meeting. Tillerson said that Trump “took note” of congressional efforts to push for additional sanctions against Russia but that he and Putin focused their discussion on “how do we move forward from here.”

McCain said Tillerson was a weak advocate for American values abroad. Asked by CBS’s John Dickerson whether he regrets his Senate vote to confirm Tillerson as secretary of state, McCain said, “Sometimes I do.”

Trump said Sunday he was eager to work with Putin on what he described as an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” the two men discussed forming “so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.”

Tillerson explained the unit as a “framework under which we might begin to have agreement on how to deal with these very complex issues of cyberthreats, cybersecurity, cyberintrusions.”

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, defended her boss’s cooperation with Putin, saying “we won’t ever trust Russia” but that working with Russia on cybersecurity will “keep them in check.”

“From a cyber standpoint, we need to get together with Russia. We need to tell them what we think should happen, shouldn’t happen, and if we talk to them about it, hopefully, we can cut this out and get them to stop,” Haley said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

She continued: “It doesn’t mean we’ve ever taken our eyes off of the ball. It doesn’t mean we ever trust Russia. We can’t trust Russia, and we won’t ever trust Russia. But you keep those that you don’t trust closer, so that you can always keep an eye on them and keep them in check, and I think that’s what we’re trying to do with Russia right now.”

Trump’s pledge to work with Putin on cybersecurity came as U.S. government officials told The Washington Post that Russian government hackers were behind recent intrusions into the systems of U.S. nuclear power and other energy companies.

The idea of a cyber partnership was roundly mocked. Former defense secretary Ashton B. Carter, who served under Obama at the time of Russia’s interference, likened it in a CNN interview to “the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary.”

McCain said facetiously on NBC, “I am sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort, since he’s doing the hacking.”

Carol Morello in Kiev, Ukraine, and David A. Fahrenthold and David Weigel in Washington contributed to this report.

The Times on Sunday reported that the president's eldest son was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016.

As Times reporters Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman explained, Trump Jr.'s motivation for agreeing to the meeting “points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.”

Paul Manafort, the campaign's chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and adviser, also attended.

Needless to say, the report looks bad for the president, even though his private legal team told the Times that Trump did not participate or even know about the meeting. Trump has a go-to playbook in situations like these: cast doubt on the credibility of unnamed sources (five, in this case) and cry, “Fake news!”

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.

Read that last part again: “the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission.

The rest of Trump Jr.'s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. The outcome of the meeting and its effect on the presidential race is important, of course, yet it is kind of beside the point.

Trump Jr.'s attempt to obtain information from a Russian lawyer that could harm Clinton seems likely to alarm investigators, regardless of whether the effort proved successful.

Trump Misleads on Russia Hacking

On the eve of his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump made some questionable claims about the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Russia hacked into U.S. political organizations to interfere in the 2016 presidential election:

Trump said the computer hacking “could have been other people and other countries.” There is no evidence for that. U.S. intelligence has named only Russia as the culprit. A Jan. 6 report based on the work of three intelligence agencies said Putin “ordered” a broad “influence campaign” to help elect Trump.

Trump claimed former President Barack Obama “did nothing” from August to Nov. 8 about Russia meddling in the election. That’s wrong. Among other things, Obama spoke to Putin about the issue in September, and his administration worked with state officials from mid-August until Election Day to prevent voting systems from being hacked.

The president made his remarks during a joint press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw on July 6. Trump made the stop in Poland on his way to a Group of 20 summit meeting in Germany, where he is scheduled to meet with Putin on July 7.

‘Other Countries’?

Hallie Jackson of NBC News asked the president if he would “once and for all, yes or no, definitively say that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.” He gave a less-than-definitive answer.

Trump, July 6: I think it was Russia. And I think it could have been other people and other countries. It could have been a lot of people interfered. I’ve said it very simply. I think it could very well have been Russia but I think it could very well have been other countries, and I won’t be specific. But I think a lot of people interfere. I think it has been happening for a long time. It has been happening for many, many years.

There is no evidence that other countries were involved in the cyberattacks.

The Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on Oct. 7, 2016, that said the U.S. intelligence community is “confident” that hacks into the email systems of the Democratic Party and its officials were directed by “Russia’s senior most officials.” The U.S. intelligence community includes 17 separate intelligence agencies.

“Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there,” the statement said. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

After the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a declassified report on Jan. 6 that went even further. That report said that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” and that “Putin ordered an influence campaign” to help Trump and damage his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The 25-page report was “drafted and coordinated” among three intelligence agencies — the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency — based on “intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies.”

Among other things, the report said, Russian military intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee computers from July 2015 to June 2016 and then used WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and “Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker,” to publicly release hacked emails and documents. The cyberattacks and public release of hacked material were part of larger “Russian propaganda efforts” to hurt Clinton and help Trump, the report said.

“Russia’s state-run propaganda machine — comprised of its domestic media apparatus, outlets targeting global audiences such as RT and Sputnik, and a network of quasi-government trolls — contributed to the influence campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences,” the report said. “State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.”

In sworn testimony before the Senate intelligence committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey said there should be no confusion that Russia interfered with the election.

Comey, June 8: There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. It was an active measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that. It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community and the members of this committee have seen the intelligence. It’s not a close call. That happened. That’s about as unfake as you can possibly get. It is very, very serious, which is why it’s so refreshing to see a bipartisan focus on that. This is about America, not about a particular party.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Trump has questioned U.S. intelligence on Russia. He did so before and after winning the election, sometimes in the same way as he did at his Warsaw press conference.

After the election, Trump issued a statement on Dec. 9 that compared U.S. intelligence on Russia’s election meddling to U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. At his press conference in Poland, Trump again raised the issue of WMDs. He said “everybody was 100 percent sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction,” but faulty intelligence “led to one big mess.”

And, as he did in Poland, Trump told Time magazine in a Nov. 28, 2016, interview: “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

But no evidence to date has emerged that China or any other country was involved.

Update, July 7: Two House members – a Republican and a Democrat – said they have seen no evidence that any country other than Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

CNN’s John Berman asked Rep. Jim Himes in a July 6 interview: “[H]ave you seen any evidence that any other country besides Russia tried to meddle in the 2016 election?” Himes, a Democratic member of the House intelligence committee, responded, “None. None.”

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a July 7 interview on MSNBC that the intelligence reports and briefings that he has received show “very clear and convincing evidence that it was a nation state attack by Russia.”

Oddly, considering my feelings about Trump, I believe he had no idea that Russia was: hacking US files, influencing the election, or indulging in any other covert activities until well after the election. He may have had a few clues and theories, but no more than the rest of us suspicious B*****ds.

He was not an experienced politician, nor (to my knowledge) privy to any intelligence information. There is an "in" set of people and an "out" one. He would have been in the latter until he became the "Chief". Then, and ONLY then he would have been "clued in".

My personal beef with his Russian dealings start at that point. As soon as there appeared to be election irregularities he should have DEMANDED an enquiry, and a thorough one. Not wait until it started to make him look bad before suddenly and acrimoniously firing the man he had previously been praising whilst he dished the dirt on the Democrats. Putting it another way: firing Comey = good, waiting till Comey switched sides first = bad.

Up until his Presidency, he had the right to do business with whom he willed. His only loyalties should have been to his employees and shareholders.

After the election, he needed to be transparently uninvolved in anything that gave his companies insider information, or used their influence upon the Presidency. Both sides of that street need to close when you are in power. Otherwise your people see a dictator, fleecing the country like a warlord in some backwater new republic of the third world - growing rich whilst their people starve.

That is where he failed so miserably. From over here that is how he appears, the only difference is that the country started our fairly rich and very powerful. The path is never upward under such leadership, I pray the path will be curtailed before too much damage is done. I like America and its people.

I just find it all very interesting,but no one to my mind is addressing the real danger to life on this planet, Climate Change,we all got our heads in the sand....i can't change anything I just watch as the human race destroys itself....

“The
Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in
their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official
documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her
dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” Goldstone
wrote in an email to Trump Jr.

“This
is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of
Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump ― helped along by Aras
and Emin,” Goldstone added. “What do you think is the best way to
handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it
directly?”

Putin really really REALLY wanted Trump to be President

WHY ???

no wonder Trump has been so soft on Russia

they OWN him

and NO DOUBT,more revelations to follow

"

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov

The release of e-mails between Donald Trump, Jr., and a British entertainment publicist describing their effort to receive anti-Hillary Clinton information from people identified as members of the Russian government has fundamentally changed the Russia story. It has also demolished the credibility of Trump, Jr. The velocity of that change was captured in a pair of e-mails that I received from a former Trump-campaign official. This morning, I asked him about revelations in the Times about the meeting between Natalia Veselnitskaya and senior Trump-campaign officials—Trump, Jr., as well as Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner—and the source practically yawned. “It is still nothing,” he responded, echoing the common refrain from most Trump defenders since Saturday, when details of the meeting first emerged.

After the e-mails were posted, he amended his reaction. “It’s moving too fast for me to appear intelligent in analysis,” he wrote back. “I know DJT2 is a good guy and wouldn’t break the law.”

In less than ninety minutes, the sentiment from people sympathetic to the President’s son had shifted from “nothingburger” to “I hope he doesn’t go to jail.”

The e-mails are highly incriminating. According to the correspondence, a Russian government official had contacted a former associate of Donald Trump, who had previously had business dealings in Russia, and offered anti-Clinton information. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Rob Goldstone, an associate of a Russian pop musician, Emin Agalarov, who was close to the Trump family, wrote. (Donald Trump once appeared in one of Agalarov’s music videos, and various reports on Tuesday noted that Emin and Trump, Jr., have texted as recently as January.)I asked Steve Schmidt, who helped run John McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign, what he would have done if he had received a similar e-mail. “Would have either ignored it or called the F.B.I.,” Schmidt told me. I also asked Charlie Black, who has been involved at the highest levels with numerous Republican campaigns, and who is also a former business partner of Manafort, if most campaign professionals would have called the F.B.I. “Yes,” he said, “but you should not cast Donnie as a campaign professional. He is not.”

Yet the e-mails show that Trump, Jr., eagerly took the meeting with Veselnitskaya that Goldstone was offering, and made it clear that Kushner and Manafort, then the two most important people in the Trump campaign, would be attending. Earlier this week, Trump, Jr., claimed that he didn’t even know who the woman was. But Goldstone described her in his e-mail to Trump, Jr., as a “Russian government attorney.” The e-mails even note that the woman’s identity would indeed be passed on to Trump, Jr., so that she could make it through security at Trump Tower, which at the time was protected by the Secret Service. Did Donald Trump himself know about the meeting? He has been silent so far on the details of these latest developments, except to offer a pro-forma statement of support: “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency.” In the e-mails released Tuesday, there is a tantalizing detail. Goldstone notes, “I can also send this info to your father via Rhona”—Trump’s longtime assistant Rhona Graff—“but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.”

The revelation about Trump, Jr.,’s eagerness to collude with the Russians—“if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” he wrote to Goldstone—is all the more shocking considering the outrage that he has expressed over such accusations. On July 24, 2016, a few weeks after his meeting with Veselnitskaya, when he was asked about complaints from the Clinton campaign that Russians had hacked Democratic National Committee servers, stolen information, and dumped it online, Trump, Jr., was indignant. “It just goes to show you their exact moral compass,” he said. “I mean, they’ll say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is time and time again, lie after lie. You notice he won’t say, ‘Well, I say this.’ We hear ‘experts.’ You know, ‘His house cat at home once said that this is what's happening with the Russians.’ It's disgusting. It’s so phony.”

On July 26th, Donald Trump mocked the idea that his campaign would seek Russia’s help uncovering Clinton dirt: “In order to try and deflect the horror and stupidity of the [WikiLeaks] disaster, the Dems said maybe it is Russia dealing with Trump. Crazy!” Trump, Jr., in a statement he tweeted today, said he was releasing the e-mail chain because he wanted to be transparent. This was also not true. He released it because he knew that the Times was about to publish it.

Until now, the Russia story has included three highly suspicious actions on the part of Trump and his associates. During the campaign, Trump publicly welcomed and celebrated Russia’s hacking and dumping campaign and profited from the damaging information. Since the election, Trump Administration officials, including Kushner, Jeff Sessions, and Michael Flynn, have routinely concealed meetings that they had with Russian officials. And Trump himself has repeatedly—as recently as last week, at the G-20 meeting in Germany—sought to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia tried to help elect him.

Despite all of this, for months the main defense of the White House and Trump supporters on Capitol Hill and in the media has been the lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. That defense crumbled on Tuesday. The new e-mails show that Trump, Jr., was told of the Russian government’s support for Donald Trump and that the younger Trump, and perhaps Kushner and Manafort as well, were eager to have the Kremlin’s help. Actively soliciting the aid of a foreign adversary in a Presidential campaign goes well beyond anything that has been previously revealed. “We are now beyond obstruction of justice,” Senator Tim Kaine told CNN on Tuesday. “This is moving into perjury, false statements, and even potentially treason.”

Will Republicans care? The earliest voices to react have been those of familiar Trump critics. “Anytime you’re in a campaign and you get an offer from a foreign government to help your campaign, the answer is no,” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters. “So, I don’t know what Mr. Trump, Jr.,’s version of the facts are. Definitely—he has to testify. That e-mail is disturbing.” Graham’s friend and fellow frequent Trump critic John McCain noted that “it’s certainly another shoe that’s dropped that needs to be pursued and looked at.” Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that she wants the committee to interview everyone who was at the meeting.

On Monday, Trump, Jr., hired a criminal-defense attorney. He was wise to do so.

The emails to Mr Trump Jr, which he released on Twitter, say "the crown prosecutor of Russia" (a role that does not exist) had "offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father".

The email chain was also forwarded to President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort.

All three later met Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York.

How the story has developed

Since he was elected, President Trump has been dogged by allegations that Russia tried to sabotage Mrs Clinton's campaign. He has denied any knowledge of this and Russia has also repeatedly denied interfering.

In May, the justice department appointed ex-FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into the Russian matter.

Analysis: 'Absolutely devastating'

The New York Times' description of the email to Donald Trump Jr from Rob Goldstone was bad news for the Trump presidency. The actual text of the emails, however, is absolutely devastating.

Trump Jr was explicitly told the Russian government wanted to provide him with documents incriminating Hillary Clinton as part of its "support for Mr Trump". Son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort were apparently copied on the entire email chain the day before the meeting. Goldstone even offered to pass the information along to Donald Trump's personal assistant.

These emails place dynamite under nearly a year's worth of assertions by Trump officials that there was no co-ordination between their campaign and the Russian government. Even if no collusion took place in this instance - all the parties to the meeting who are speaking publicly deny that any information was exchanged - Trump Jr wasn't just open to Russian help, he "loved" it.

Time and time again members of President Trump's inner circle have denied contacts with Russian nationals only to later revise their assertions when new facts emerged. These emails may have given the public the first glimpse of why such elaborate defences were constructed.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - a Trump critic - said the emails were "very disturbing", adding that the meeting should never have been held in the first place.

He told reporters on Capitol Hill: "This is the most problematic thing that I've seen thus far... the most direct evidence yet... that the Russian government was interested in helping the Trump campaign."

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